Post-Taliban Afghanistan and Regional Co-Operation in Central Asia

POST-TALIBAN AFGHANISTAN AND REGIONAL CO-OPERATION IN CENTRAL ASIA PETER TOMSEN Peter Tomsen was US Special Envoy and Ambassador to Afghanistan, 1989-92. He is currently US Ambassador in Residence, University of Nebraska at Omaha. A fresh geopolitical configuration in and around Afghanistan is emerging from the destruction of the Pakistan-supported Taliban-al-Qaeda regime. The remainder of this decade could witness the regional powers shift away from competition with each other for domination of Afghanistan. Conversely, a new innings of the centuries old ‘Great Game’ might unfold, repeating the all too familiar scenario of war, terrorism, drug trafficking, refugee outflows and instability in Afghanistan. The benefits would be substantial should Afghanistan’s neighbours choose the first alternative of regional co-operation in Central Asia. A stable Afghanistan could offer a Central Asian crossroads for regional and global commerce along a sweeping north-south and east-west axis. Global trade corridors intersecting at the centre of Eurasia would prove an economic boon to Iran, Pakistan, Russia and the Central Asian republics, as well as to Afghanistan itself. Pakistan – which cannot transit Afghanistan to market its products in Central Asia, the Caspian basin and China while instability persists in Afghanistan – would benefit the most. A shift from competition to co-operation among the major powers in Central Asia is by no means certain, notwithstanding the massive peace dividends. The historic rapprochement of regional states in post-World War II Western Europe and post-Vietnam Southeast Asia produced the enormously successful European Union and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Collaboration for regional stability and common economic and political progress replaced internecine confrontation and conflict. In Southeast Asia, the mending of long-standing bilateral disputes was a necessary prerequisite for successful regional co-operation. Malaysia and Indonesia needed to bury the hatchet over conflicting border claims that had erupted into an undeclared war in the early 1960s. The Philippines and Indonesia likewise set aside their border dispute in order to become partners in the successful Southeast Asian regional co-operation process culminating in ASEAN. A similar trend toward regional reconciliation is needed in early twenty-first century Central Asia. This would entail, however, eschewing ‘Great Game’ geopolitics in favour of regional co-operation. WHAT IS THE GREAT GAME? The term ‘Great Game’ was coined by an official in the nineteenth century British Indian Empire. He was referring to the major regional powers’ competition to dominate strategically located Afghanistan, where empires historically have rubbed together at the centre of Eurasia. Since Alexander the Great1 entered the area of present day Afghanistan in the fourth century BC, foreign invaders have found it easy to get into Afghanistan – and hard to get out. Afghanistan’s forbidding terrain and the stubborn tribes occupying it were often 1 underestimated by successive invaders. Mogul, Persian and British imperial armies followed one another into Afghanistan. Holed up in their mountainous redoubts, the proud, independent, self-confident Afghans proved hospitable to guests but not to invaders. As one senior British official put it almost two hundred years ago: “To sum up the character of the Afghans in a few words: their vices are revenge, envy, avarice, rapacity and obstinacy; on the other hand they are fond of liberty, faithful to their friends, kind to their dependants, hospitable, hardy, frugal, laborious and prudent; and they are less disposed than the nations in their neighbourhood to falsehood, intrigue and deceit.”(2) Late twentieth century invaders – the Soviets, followed by the Pakistani military aligned with Muslim extremists from the Persian Gulf – attempted to wield ideology to buttress their imperialism in Afghanistan. The Great Game took on global implications. The contest went beyond militarily subduing the Afghans to acquire another bit of territory on the periphery of empires to also include ideological pretensions. Moscow’s Cold War politics thus sought to project the inexorable spread of communism, with gains defended by the Soviet Army as necessary.(3) Soviet supported coups in 1973 and 1978 sought to move Afghanistan to the communist side of the Cold War ledger. The 1979 Soviet invasion attempted to confirm communist moorings for Afghanistan. Muslim extremism, sponsored by Pakistan’s military and radical Arabs aimed to replace Soviet-sponsored communism with Muslim extremism. The resultant ideological polarisation kept Afghanistan in a bloody trough of warfare for twenty-three years. COLD WAR GEOPOLITICS AND AFGHANISTAN Afghanistan was one of many Cold War arenas of competition in which Soviet communism sparred with Western capitalism for over forty years. It was not, however, a major focal point of superpower contention for most of this period. Afghanistan was too remote to fit into the American alliance system ringing the Soviet Union. Partly for this reason, but mostly due to Afghanistan’s historic record of jealously guarding its independence, Moscow gave Afghanistan a relatively low priority. By the 1950s, the Soviet Union and its geopolitical ally India were attempting to convert Afghanistan into the upper lip of a strategic vice meant to crush Pakistan, a member of both the American-supported Central Treaty Organisation (CENTO) and the American-led Southeast Asian Treaty Organisation (SEATO). Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union viewed Afghanistan in itself as a partner with which to align. Both manipulated Afghanistan towards serving its broader strategy against the other: Moscow to weaken American containment pressure along the USSR’s southern periphery, Washington to maintain Pakistan as the strong, strategic lynchpin connecting the CENTO and SEATO alliances.(4) As the Soviet Union and India manipulated the ‘Pashtunistan’ issue to separate the Pashtun areas in Pakistan from the rest of Pakistan, they found an eager ally in Mohammed Daoud, the Afghan ruler from 1963 to 1973 (under the reign of King Zahir) and from 1973 to 1978 (after Zahir was deposed). Daoud, eventually assassinated in a KGB-supported communist coup in 1978, championed the Pashtunistan cause to strengthen his own political position inside Afghanistan. The United States, aware that Pashtunistan’s separation from Pakistan would destroy its ally, Pakistan, rejected Daoud’s appeals to Washington for military assistance. In 1954, Secretary of State John Dulles, in a formal diplomatic note, went beyond turning down Daoud’s request for US military aid. He instead urged Afghanistan to resolve the Pashtunistan issue with Pakistan. Adding insult to injury, Dulles sent a copy of the note to Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington. Thus alienated by Washington, one month later Daoud concluded 2 the first Afghan arms agreement with Moscow. Within a year, Soviet leaders Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin visited Kabul to launch major Soviet military and economic aid programmes in Afghanistan. In 1957, worried about growing Soviet penetration of the Afghan military and government, an American National Security memorandum belatedly advised: “The United States should try to resolve the Afghan dispute with Pakistan and encourage Afghanistan to minimize its reliance upon the Communist bloc for military training and equipment, to look to the United States and other free world sources for military training and assistance.”(5) The limited US military assistance programme that ensued was dwarfed by the inside track Moscow already had established within Afghanistan’s military establishment. Over time, the KGB and GRU ‘turned’ many lower- and middle-ranking Afghan army officers into Soviet agents during their military training in the USSR. Daoud, labelled the ‘Red Prince’ after his 1973 comeback in league with the Afghan Parchami communist faction, failed to walk the tightrope between maintaining Afghan independence and eluding the Soviet grasp. By 1977, his frantic effort to downplay Pashtunistan to avoid the Soviet trap by lessening tensions with Pakistan was a classic case of too little, too late. That year, the Soviets clandestinely brokered unity between the Afghan communist Khalqi and Parchami factions. Soviet-trained Afghan army officers, who were also members of the newly united Afghan communist party, led the 1978 military overthrow of Daoud. Daoud lost his life, gunned down in his palace by his own Afghan troops; Afghanistan lost its independence and tumbled into a bloody conflict which would last a quarter of a century. PAKISTAN POLICY: OLD WINE IN NEW BOTTLES? Afghans are hopeful that outside intervention as well as the ideologies of communism and Muslim extremism have been sufficiently discredited to open a window of peace for Afghanistan and the region. The establishment of long-term stability, and economic and democratic progress for Afghanistan, however, will first depend mainly on improved bilateral relations between the major regional powers surrounding Afghanistan. Pakistan’s co- operation will be especially important. Despite Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf’s steps to clamp down on Islamic radicalism, Muslim extremist elements in Pakistan’s military, religious and political circles remain in place and could again play a spoiler role in Afghanistan. Incentives for a constructive Pakistani approach would include Pakistan’s desperately

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